Squatters

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Commander Zero

Ugh…’real life’ has intruded lately, making my posting a little more sporadic than usual. I’m doing a sort of ‘property manager’ thing for my landlord. In exchange for a deal on the rent, I’m keeping an eye on the building, vacuuming the common areas, showing apartments to prospective tenants, etc.

The other day a tenant told me that the lock on the front door of the building was not working. Sure enough, the deadbolt would work regardless of the entry code you entered. The tenant mentioned that he had encountered people in the basement of the building where the laundry room is who did not belong there.

The basement of the apartment building is a rats warren of storage spaces, closets, not-up-to-code living spaces, and generally a great place to hide. So…grab the 870 and a flashlight and lets go look for squatters.

As it turns out, while I did not find any squatters I did find their nest:

A backpack, sleeping bad, spoiled food, and some personal belongings. All of which smelled horribly of body odor. In addition to the gear, there were a couple notebooks where the parasite had written about his hitchhiking and riding the rails across the US. The food labels were dated around Christmas so this guy left his gear and never came back, apparently. I’m guessing he either got tossed in jail or did something that made him leave town in a hurry.

The fact he was chronicling his journey leads me to believe he’s more of one of these 20-something hipster-homeless guys rather than some Sterno-chugging genuine homeless wretch.

So..if you’re going to go on a grand adventure, what does the parasitical traveler take with them? Theres a decent but no-name backpack, a Slumberjack sleeping bag, some clothing, a bag of small rocks, a small metal tin full of ‘slogan’ patches you’d sew on clothing, some smoking materials, snack wrappers, and not much else. Im guessing the truly valuable things like money, ID, a knife, etc, are things this guy kept on his person.

So what to do? Well, this crap goes in the dumpster. (Although I’ll keep a couple carabiners that are clipped to the pack.)

Clearly what is going on here is that someone discovered that the basement was nice, warm, and relatively unoccupied. When the temperature got too cold, they hid out in an out-of-the-way room in the basement. Rent-free. This is why we can’t have nice things.. because there is always some idiot who thinks that their need for something trumps your ownership of it. The landlord pays taxes on the building, pays for repairs, takes the financial hits of irresponsible tenants, tries to keep the place running, and some waste of skin decides that since its a cold night, perhaps that basement should be made available for those who need it.

This is the problem with the world today. Too many people figure that because they need something they are entitled to have it, at the expense of others. The most annoying case of it I see now are people who owe money on student loans and because they can’t pay them back (usually due to spending money on a course of study with no real financial future…Gender Issues In Renaissance Art, for example) decide that those loans should be ‘forgiven’. Geez, man..I’d love to have the .gov cut me a check for $50k and then have them forget about it when I claim it was predatory lending.

I’m probably feeling bitter because tax season approaches and, as a self-employed person, I get the full treatment.

Unfortunately, people like this are going to be exceptionally pervasive during any true crisis. They’ll demand that you ‘do something’ on their behalf because you have ‘all that [food/fuel/water/medicine/clothing]’ and they don’t. Never mind that their deficiencies could have been easily remedied if they’d actually done more thinking about the future and less pot-smoking down at the park with their buddies. Worse, they convince their fellow-travelers in .gov to give some legal standing to these demands for ‘fairness’.

These squatters are just symptomatic, but extremely emblematic, of the greater issue. Sadly, it is one that I don’t think I’m going to be able to resolve on any level greater than the immediate surroundings of the building I’m maintaining.

Remington 870 Dimple Removal

Posted on January 17, 2015 by Commander Zero

You know ’em, you love ’em…its the Remington 870 shotgun. A fine scattergun that is so widely represented in this country that you’d have to look pretty hard to find a police department that didn’t have them as the ‘standard’ shotgun. Reasonably affordable, well built, and the target of a huge accessory market, pretty much every survivalist has one. (Although, to be fair, Mossberg’s 500 series is probably an extremely close second-place finisher in this.)

A standard accessory that most folks drop onto their 870 is a magazine tube extension. After all, no one ever had a sudden violent emergency and thought ‘man, I wish I had one or two less shells in this thing.’ It used to be that adding a magazine extension was as simple as unscrew magazine endcap, remove old spring and follower, drop in follower and new spring, screw extension onto end of magazine tube…done. Unfortunately, a while back, the guys at Remington, for whatever reason, added two ‘dimples’ in the magazine tube. If you add a magazine extension, the dimples will keep the follower from traveling past those dimples.

Thus, if you want to add an extended magazine to your 870, and your mag tube has those dimples, you’re going to have to remove them. There are two methods for doing this:

‘Press out’ the dimples. This is often done by shoving a socket (from a socket wrench set) of apprpriate diameter down the magazine tube and using it as an anvil to press out the dimples with a c-clamp or hammer. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes you have a hell of a time removing that socket from the magazine tube.
Drill out the dimples. Easy, fast, and usually trouble free.

Today, I went with option #2 . (By the way, you can Google ‘remove 870 dimples’ and get a buncha videos on either process.)

First step, unload shotgun, make sure its unloaded, unload it some more, and then, finally, make sure it’s unloaded.

Next up, remove barrel and forend. Easy peasy.

Behold the offending dimples:

The hated dimple. It’s like some sort of Schumer-Feinstein Speed Bump keeping an otherwise good shotgun from becoming a better shotgun.

The goal is to remove the whole bloody thing. For that, you’ll need a good size drill bit capable of easily and smoothly drilling metal.

In this case, a 5/16″ bit, centered on the dimple, should be wide enough to do the job.

It’s a good bit easier to have someone else hold the gun steady while you get all drilltastic on it, but, if you have no choice, you can do the job solo.

Don’t be an idiot….drill through one dimple, then flip the gun over, and drill the other one. Don’t just drill straight through.

Now, once the drilling is done, you’ve still got some work ahead of you. That magazine follower needs to slide up and down that magazine tube like Sasha Grey on a Vegas stripper pole. So…you’re going to have to polish the inside of the magazine tube where you drilled the holes to make sure there are no rough edges or anything that will snag the magazine follower. There are a couple ways to do this…here’s the easiest. Go grab your Dremel set (aka ‘The Gunsmiths Friend’) and pull out one of those sanding/polishing drums. The holes you drilled aren’t so far down the magazine that you can’t reach them with the Dremel. I already had my drill out so I just chucked the Dremel bit into the drill.

Spin it up, get in there, and start polishing. You want to remove any jagged bit of metal from the drilling process. You want absolutely no jagged edge, lip, or raised metal from where the drill bit passed through the metal. You can’t really overpolish things, so go to far rather than not far enough.

When finished, I ran a 12 ga. BoreSnake through the mag tube a bunch of times to make sure any debris was removed.

12 ga. BoreSnake to make sure debris is removed. Will also snag on any obvious jagged edges you missed.

A word about followers. This is the crappy, lightweight, flimsy, plastic, OEM follower Remington sent this shotgun out into the world with. Let’s not sugarcoat it…its a POS.

Has the overall quality feel of the little plastic patio table that keeps the box lid off your pizza cheese. Doesn’t instill much confidence.

Other than it being a good, bright color it has nothing going for it. Oh, I’m sure it will work but I want something with some ruggedness, some heft, some substance.

From Wilson Combat. Still plastic, but much more solid.

Wilson Combat 870 follower. There are some others out there, including stainless steel ones, but I’m comfortable with this one. Some followers have grooves to accommodate the dimples (so they claim). I don’t trust them. I’m sure there is a way the follower can rotate slightly in the magazine tube and then have the grooves not line up with dimples. You’re welcome to put your faith in them, but I’ll settle for a dimple-less mag tube and the peace of mind it brings.

So, once you have the drilled holes polished and smooth on the inside of the magazine tube it’s time to put the gun back together. I’m not going to tell you how..if you got it apart, you should be able to get it back together….if not, plenty of videos on YouTube to show you how.

The next thing, which I should hope you would find obvious, is to test the thing. Go get some dummy shotgun shells and load up the magazine. Cycle through all the shells. When the gun is empty the follower should be visible to show you that the gun is empty.

If the gun has ejected all the shells and you don’t see the follower, that means it is hung up in the tube. Take everything apart and get back to polishing. Also, check the follower for sharp edges as well. I slightly rounded the edges on mine just make sure it would run smoothly up and down the tube. Don’t neglect this function testing. When you’re done with the function test, do it again. And again. I do it about a dozen times because you really can’t have too much confidence in your firearms. When its done, load up the shotgun with your dummy shells and let it sit for a few days, then do the function check a few times again and make sure everything is fine. Once you’re satisfied, go to the range and shoot a case of cheap shells through it to give it a final function check.

The finished product, exorcised of the dimples. Ready for whatever life throws at it. (Although, realistically, I need to get a rear sling swivel on there.

If you’re buying a used 870, check to see if it has the dimples. There are millions of ’em out there that don’t and if its a choice between two used 870’s, equal in all respects except for the dimples, I’d buy the one without.

Do a pair of holes in the mag tube pose a risk of dirt getting in there? Well, certainly more risk than if the holes weren‘t there. However, the only time the holes are uncovered are when you actually cycle the action of the gun. The rest of the time they are covered by the forend. Honestly, I see it as a non-issue unless I drop the 870 in a sandbox or something.

There you have it – how to remove Remington 870 magazine dimples. Assuming you have a power drill and nothing else, you’ll need:

5/16″ drill bit – about $3.00 for a good one
Dremel polishing/sanding drum – probably five bucks
12 ga. BoreSnake – $12 but you should already have one of these anyway

Armed with this knowledge, I urge you to go forth and eliminate the dimples wherever you may find them…until our great nation is again a nation of undimpled Remington 870’s. So say we all.

ATF and the arm brace..now with 100% more WTF

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Commander Zero

ATF pens letter on ‘redesigning’ handgun with stabilizing brace
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/01/16/sig-brace-no-go-per-atf/

Short version: ATFE sez it’s an arm brace..until you put it up to your shoulder…then you have magically ‘redesigned’ it into a shoulder stock and you’re treading into NFA country.

So..according to the weasels at ATFE…how you use something can ‘redesign’ it. It’s like ATFE has singlehandedly turned every household item into some sort of Transformer. Car out of gas? You’ve redesigned it into a sculpture. Taking a wiz on a campfire? You’ve redesigned your johnson into a fire extinguisher.

This will be interesting to see play out.

ARcaholics Anonymous……….

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Commander Zero

Must…not…buy…another…AR……

CostCo hashbrowns

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Commander Zero

There are some combinations that are just counter productive – black Klansman, blind tattoo artist, deaf piano tuner, claustrophobic escape artist, that sorta thing. Sadly, my particular dead-end combination is that Im a person who really likes to eat but doesnt really like to cook. In short, Im a lazy cook.

For example, I can make a very nice red sauce from scratch. Fresh basil, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, a bit of onion, a long time on the stove and – voila – terrific homemade spaghetti sauce. But nine times out of ten, I’ll just crack open a jar of prepared sauce because I want to eat, not cook.

As a result of this, I’m always on the look out for food that tastes good, keeps well, and requires minimal effort. As I was strolling through CostCo the other day I came across these:

Yup, another crappy cellphone pic. Brand is “Golden Grill Russet”.

Now, to my way of thinking, nothing is going to make an apocalypse more bearable than a decent breakfast. The cheap and easy way out for most of us is a bucket full of those little packets of Quaker instant oatmeal. And, yeah, its better than nothing in a pinch. But when you’ve got a long day shooting looters, moving debris, scavenging the ruins, and running for your life ahead of you it might be nice to have a real breakfast. Fortunately, with a little pre-planning you can have eggs, bacon, fruit, hasbrowns, coffee, and orange drink for breakfast.

CostCo had these hashbrowns in little pint-size cardboard cartons and, being a sucker for ‘individual serving size’ packages, I threw ’em in the cart. Figured I’d take a chance on them. The instructions say to open the container, fill with really hot water, close container, let sit for twelve minutes, drain, then fry in a pan. Okay, followed the instructions and twelve minutes later there was a huge pile of hash browns ready for the pan. I mean these things increased in size exponentially. I’m not a shy eater…. ‘two servings’ is what I’d consider single serve. But there was a lot of hash browns coming out of that container. Easily enough for two hungry guys and probably enough for at least three average people.

Theres nothing in this pic for scale, but trust me…thats a LOT of hash browns. And they’re yummy.

Fried ’em up in butter, added some salt and some ketchup, and they were really good. Highly recommend. Im going to have to pick up another one or two packages of them. Eight cartons to package so one or two should handle most short- to mid-length crises. They’d also be an amazingly good choice for camping if you break it down to a smaller package.

The packaging is about the same as a pint of milk – a treated, coated cardboard container. Expiration date is about a year, but as is usual in these sorts of things that date is probably very conservative. Unless the packaging takes some damage these should have years on them. I found them at CostCo but it turns out they’re available on Amazon as well (where they get very high reviews.)

Case of these, a can of bacon, some freeze dried eggs, big tub o’ Tang, and a couple cans of fruit, and you’ve pretty much got the long-term-storage breakfast thing under control. But, they’re also quite good to the point you might just use ’em on a Sunday morning where you don’t feel like making a lot of effort. One of the rare ‘storage foods’ that really is good enough to eat during ‘normal’ times.

Folks you meet at CrossFit..or..How To Survive In The Woods

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Commander Zero

More CrossFit. Behold, a sweat angel:

This is what happens when after the workout you flop down on your back on the floor to try and get your breath back. This is also what it looks like, I would imagine, after the paramedics peel you off the floor and ship your carcass to the hospital.

But, more interestingly, the fella instructing the class had his own ‘lost in the woods’ survival experience that I was curious about. He got turned around while out hunting and wound up having to spend the night in the sticks as it dumped 13″ of snow on his position and the temperature clocked in around 0 degrees. He survived with no apparent injuries and was helicoptered out the next day. I asked him what happened:

Him and his hunting buddy drove up a forest service road way back into the boonies, they then parked and rode their mountain bikes further in, they then parked the bikes and hiked in on foot. They then split up, one guy heading up one ridge and one guy heading up the other. After a while he broke for lunch and as he was eating he spied a mule deer out of the corner of his eye. He chased after it and by the time he came up for air he realized he had gotten turned around. He wandered for a while, back tracking, climbing up and down the hills, before realizing he was well and thoroughly turned around.

The weather was starting to change and daylight was fading fast. He built himself a big fire , broke out his mylar blanket, and settled in for the night. He would alternate between getting wood for the fire and sitting on heated rocks to stay warm. His cellphone was dead and had minimal signal. At one point he tried it and it had just enough charge for him to get a GPS coord and to text those coords to his wife. But…he would have to make it through the night before help could get to him. The next morning he tried wandering towards what he thought was a road and as he did so the rescue ‘copter flew right over him on its way to the coords of his campsite. He was sure he’d screwed the pooch but they circled around again and he waved ’em down with his space blanket. The recovered him and got him to safety.

I asked if he had carried any special survival gear and he said it was just the mylar, nalgene bottle, celphone, firestarter, and the usual hunting gear….no extra clothes. He said he normally would have carried a spare cellphone charger with him but it was in his truck and they had taken his buddys rig to go hunting. What he did do, which made all the difference in the world, was once he realized he was well and truly lost he made camp while there was still light to see what he was doing and got a big fire going. He did mention that he will make sure to take his GPS along next time. (I’d go with map-n-compass as a backup, but Im not going to armchair quarterback this guy to his face.)

As you know, even when cell reception is too spotty for voice, text messages can often get through. In his case it made all the difference.

It was an interesting conversation, mostly because this is the first time I’ve actually gotten to talk to someone who had one of these experiences and it was quite interesting to hear the first-hand account. He also says, by the way, his subsequent hunting trips have not been as deep into the sticks as that one. His wife keeps him ‘on a short leash’, as he says.

My own experiences hunting and getting caught in bad weather tell me that while it is very easy to go overboard and encumber yourself with too much gear, there’s definitely a possibility of undergearing yourself as well. Its a tough balancing act to keep things light enough for tromping up and down mountains all day and having the gear you need when things go sideways. Something to think about.

Article – Ted Turner’s Doomsday Video at CNN

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Commander Zero

When CNN launched in 1980, founder Ted Turner already knew how it was going to end. “Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends,” he reportedly said. “When the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ before we sign off.”

According to various rumors over the past three decades, Turner made good on that promise, creating a tape that would only be played in case of apocalypse: the combined Armed Forces marching band playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” according to The New Yorker. But few people had ever seen the tape… until now. Jalopnik writer Michael Ballaban has posted a grainy, minute-long video that he says he unearthed in 2009 while interning for Wolf Blitzer at The Situation Room, under the simple name “Turner Doomsday Video” (as seen in the screenshot above.) Formatted for standard-definition 4:3 television, it would make a bizarre sight today — although we might, obviously, be too busy with the end of days to notice.

Gotta tell you, if its the end of the world I have a lot better things to do than sit around watching CNN playing band music. And even if the end of the world event were truly ‘end of the world’ where we’re all 100% guaranteed dead tomorrow I would still have something(s) better to do and they mostly involve me being naked and a whole buncha chicks who realize that they’ve nothing left to lose.

Glockness

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Commander Zero

Completely unexpected, completely unwanted, but when a paperless like-new Gen3 Glock comes your way for way below market what can you do?

I’ll sit on it until someone with a 9mm Glock is looking for something to trade. In the meantime, maybe I’ll throw a Streamlight on it and use it as a house gun.

Back to the gym

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Commander Zero

Had an interesting, although brief, conversation the other day that I thought might be worth repeating.

For reasons that don’t need going into at this juncture, I have signed back on to CrossFit. After the last session the instructor asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to work on in the sessions. I said that I wanted to work on stamina and endurance so that at the end of the class I’m not laying on the floor gasping for air (which is usually how I end a class). He then asked, ‘what about outside class?’ I misinterpreted the question and thought he was inquiring how things were in general in m life. No, thats not what I meant. he said. Then it dawned on me what the real question was. “Oh. I get it. Well, I need to work on things like being able to carry heavy objects over distances..things like water and fuel cans, climb over obstacles, run distances with gear, pick up people and things and move them around…you know, your basic end-of-the-world survivability stuff.” He nodded his head and said that was pretty much what he was shooting for as well.

That’s pretty much what made me interested in CrossFit, the notion that it wasn’t about being able to do one thing – like running, or lifting a record-setting weight – but rather that it purports to promote ‘functional fitness’. That is to say, the things you do in the real world…jumping up onto things, climbing things, running with weights, pushing/pulling things.

The way I figure it, no matter what flavor of apocalypse youre expecting, you’re going to need to do things like carry a spare tire a couple hundred yards to a vehicle, lift heavy debris off a roadway, unload a dozen 5-gallon fuel cans off a truck and then into another one, run distances while carrying stuff, etc, etc….all those physical things that are going to make the apocalypse such a pain in the butt. Thus far, CrossFit seems to support those sorts of physical tasks. So…back to CrossFit for a while.

I metnion it because it is so easy to get wrapped up in all the other sexy stuff in preparedness and ignore things like physical ability. And Im the first one to agree that it’s a lot easier and more fun to order preparedness gear off the internet and consider yourself ‘prepared’ than it is to do the really crappy, annoying, loathsome things like exercising regularly.

10/22 mag prefs

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Commander Zero

If you had to pick one .22 rifle as ‘the survivalists .22 rifle’ it would be highly unlikely that anyone would strongly disagree with the choice of the Ruger 10/22. Having been around for around fifty years, pretty much everyone makes accessories for the gun and if there’s a gun shop out there that doesn’t carry 10/22 rifles or accessories, I haven’t seen it.

Problem is,as with just about any semiauto, some mags are good and some are crap. My experiences have been that there are a handful of good magazines out there and plenty of bad ones.

For an amazing amount of time, Ruger only offered the 10-rd mag for the 10/22. Thats fine, theyre really really good mags. But, they are limited to ten rounds and sometimes you just dont feel like swapping mags all the time. Ruger eventually introduced some 25-round factory mags but, interestingly, they have a mixed reputation….a very rare case of a factory mag not being as good as the aftermarket mag.

If your needs can be met with a 10-rd mag, the factory Ruger 10/22 mag is pretty much the best and only way to go. These mags are several years old.

For aftermarket Ruger 10/22 mags its pretty hard to go bad with the Butler Creek stuff. Sure, your mileage may vary, but my experience has been almost uniformly positive. The Butler Creek mags come in two flavors: Hot Lips and Steel Lips. The Hot Lips are mags with plastic feed lips and the Steel Lips are the mags with…well, you can figure out.

Back in ’94 I grabbed as many Hot Lip mags as I could and used them for the next ten years, as Slick Willie’s repulsive ‘Assault Weapons Ban’ made making new mags holding ten rounds a crime (unless, of course, those mags were for the cops or military…in which case they had to be marked as such.)

So, for ten years I had about a dozen Hot Lips mags to use. They held up quite well but they eventually started having problems. But, it was a good opportunity to learn just how much life you could get out of a $15 magazine before it needed replacement. The answer, it seems, is about ten years.

Ca. pre-1994 Butler Creek Hot Lips mag on left, new Butler Creek Steel Lip mag on right. Note the plastic feedlips on the Hot Lips mag showing wear and fraying from years of use.

The Steel Lips magazines, obviously, were a good bit more durable in the feed lip department than the Hot Lips mags. They charge a bit more for the Steel Lips magazines but I’m of the opinion that it is very much worth it. I still sock away the Hot Lips mags, but if I come across a good deal on the Steel Lips I’ll go ahead and get as many of them as I can.

Now that Ruger has re-introduced their Charger 10/22, and brought out the American Rimfire, both of which take the 10/22 magazine so it’s really not a bad idea to get the most durable mag possible. Ten years of regular usage showed that the plastic Hot Lips mags could serve well, but I think in the future I’ll be socking away the Steel Lips more than the Hot Lips.

New BC Steel Lip mag (L.), pre-1994 Hot Lips mag on right shows signs of wear and age from being used frequently during 1994-2004. Mag still functions but it best saved for ‘range use’ or non-critical usage. A replacement is about eight bucks….for now.

The only other aftermarket non-BC mag for the 10/22 I’ve found that was any good are the Eagle brand mags. These are also a plastic-lip mag but they can usually be found in bulk at bargain prices…sometimes around $5-6 ea. They’re good for using at the range and otherwise taking the pressure off of your stash of Butler Creek mags…but for packing away a rifle, case of ammo, and a dozen mags, I’ll stick with the Butler Creek mags.

The best sources I’ve found for deals on the BC mags are either CDNN, MGE, or GAS. You 9or your dealer) will have to subscribe for their email specials but usually once or twice a year they’ll have specials on the 10/22 mags. When they do, don’t cheap out and buy five….get as many as you can afford. They’ll always have a good value and if there’s another magazineban they’ll really be worth their weight in silver.

For carrying magazines, there’s a couple outfits that make single-pouch mags that ride on your belt and, if you don’t mind looking a little like Carl Spackler, there are some chest rigs out there as well. When the gophers are about to overrun your position, and the haze is too thick for air support, a rig like that might save you from being pounded into the dust by thousands of tiny feet.

“License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit – ever. They’re like the Viet Cong – Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that’s all she wrote…” -Carl Spackler

So, just my two cents worth, but if you’re gonna go with the 10/22 for most of your .22 rifle needs you’d be doing the smart thing to go heavy on the Butler Creek mags.